McCain's VP is...

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Elok
I don't know the demographics of the average GOP voter, but I seem to recall most of the Polytubbies from countries with state-provided healthcare saying it sucks some big sweaty donkey balls. They all wind up waiting for-freaking-EVER to see a doctor for anything.

Wow! Someone actually agrees with BK.

Speaking as a poor person in a red state national health care will save some poor people's lives.

[Elok]

I'm not saying I agree with anybody, just that I thought I'd heard a lot of our Euros and such saying that socialized medicine is all but worthless.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Darius871
But the statistics don't bear that assumption out:

What about the number of kids that come from conservative families that become liberal compared to the reverse? Even the study admits it's nonconclusive. Liberal city dwellers have always had smaller families. We make up for it some how.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Elok
I'm not saying I agree with anybody, just that I thought I'd heard a lot of our Euros and such saying that socialized medicine is all but worthless.

Anyone who's actually not a right wing lunatic? I've heard that it's actually quite good depending on the country. The UK is generally regarded as bad, but because they don't spend any money on it. Germany is regarded as pretty good, and I've spoken to people in real life who have confirmed this.

[Asher]

Do Those Who Live Together Vote Together?

So you think when a child "moves to a big city" they still live with their parents?

[Asher]

Originally posted by Elok
I'm not saying I agree with anybody, just that I thought I'd heard a lot of our Euros and such saying that socialized medicine is all but worthless.

Heh. You're crazy.

While there are issues with most implementations of socialized healthcare, Euros or Canadians who want a private healthcare system like the US are very few and far between. If you look at any one country with socialized healthcare and asked its citizens if they'd prefer the American model, I guarantee you a majority would say no.

Canada has socialized healthcare but even the right wing parties don't want to get rid of it. There are some reforms needed, of course, but it's far closer to the ideal than the embarrassing US system.

[Darius871]

Originally posted by Asher

Do Those Who Live Together Vote Together?

So you think when a child "moves to a big city" they still live with their parents?

Hence the section on studies which specifically focused on subjects after they'd moved out as opposed to when they lived together (not that I actually supposed you'd bother reading beyond the damned title):

Continuity

Since longitudinal studies of the general public have shown that individual party affiliations are remarkably stable over time (Converse & Markus, 1979), one can infer that affiliations ingrained by parental indoctrination are similarly stable. However, two important studies have analyzed the continuity of parental influence in particular. In the aforementioned 1959 cross-sectional study by Nogee & Levin, at least 65% of college seniors reported their political stance had not changed in the four years living away from their parents, and interestingly over 80% of business majors reported no change. Later Jennings and Niemi (1975) conducted an eight-year longitudinal study that surveyed the same subject dyads in both 1965 and 1973, and they concluded their data “unequivocally” supported the notion that party preferences absorbed in adolescence remain stable in early adulthood.

[Asher]

I dunno, my dad's a staunch Republican supporter and I don't vote Republican. It's actually true a lot in Alberta, the parents are staunch right wingers and the kids are far more centrics/left wing...don't know why it's any different elsewhere.

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Yeah, but the problem is those demographics don't generally carry forward. What's the old line? "If you're not liberal when you're young you have no heart, if you're not conservative when you're old you have no brain." Something like that.

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by Elok
I'm not saying I agree with anybody, just that I thought I'd heard a lot of our Euros and such saying that socialized medicine is all but worthless.

Canucks ***** and moan about our healthcare a lot. However, if given a choice between everyone is covered and gets care even if often poor or delayed (Canada) and everyman for himself with higher quality, but those who can't afford it be damned (US) a resounding majority of Canadians would stick with what we've got. I think.

The rabble rousing here is not over whether we should have public healthcare (we should, it is widely agreed) but what should be available in addition to the public system.

There are those who think the public system is too all-encompassing, for instance where things that would support a private system are illegal (like insurance for conditions covered by the public system) or suppressed (like doctors have to choose between working in the public system or the private). No doubt there are very few private doctors in an environment where very few could afford to pay them.

And then there are those who feel that any concession to a private system will lead to diversion of resources and funding from the public system and therefore oppose any change that would lead to any sort of viable private system at all.

[Kidlicious]

In the US where you move means a lot. Cities grow, that's how liberalism survives.

[Darius871]

Originally posted by Asher
I dunno, my dad's a staunch Republican supporter and I don't vote Republican. It's actually true a lot in Alberta, the parents are staunch right wingers and the kids are far more centrics/left wing...don't know why it's any different elsewhere.

I'll be lazy and just paste what I'd said to VJ when he made the same point - these studies were all in the U.S. and it could just be a cultural thing.

Originally posted by Darius871
Aside from the sampling problem, I'd also caution against making any nomothetic cross-national comparison here. First of all you have 3 major parties and over half a dozen parties represented in parliament IIRC, which makes party defection FAR more likely than in the Billy Yank's 'either-or' choice.

Secondly, there could very well be subtle cultural differences at play here. Perhaps, for instance, Americans are less encouraged to think critically than Finns (damn likely IMO), so the latter would be more likely to "rebel" once they move out and the former would be more likely to simply gravitate toward like-minded people and shelter themselves. In that scenario your anecdotal observations hold even less water when it comes to the Brooks' piece on American voters.

Or in short, we're mostly morans who don't care to listen to other perspectives.

[Impaler[WrG]]

Given that about 80% of people with an identifiable party preference grow up to vote the same way as their parents

This is the critical flaw in your study, the 80% figure is presented as a composite percentage and then in a statistical slight of hand applied to BOTH democrat and republicans without the slightest justification. The 80% could be the result of two wildly different amounts of cross-over from democrats and republicans. The study completely falls apart like the pathetic house of cards it is once this is exposed.

I'd suspect that more people who grow up in liberal households stay liberal then the converse, and the 'gap' is reversed with liberals increasing in number, this is what we would expect as the country is clearly in the long run moving towards more liberal positions.

[Darius871]

Originally posted by Impaler[WrG]


This is the critical flaw in your study, the 80% figure

I fail to see how the study falls like a house of cards when that 80% figure wasn't even included in it. That was an unsupported assumption in DanS' completely unrelated post quoted & linked above, and in fact the study's explicit purpose was to test the validity of that assumption. Please retake reading comp and try again.

[Heresson]

Originally posted by SlowwHand


What?

She knew she is going to give birth to a, hm, retarded, child, yet she didn't make an abortion, like many would.